Sending people off to jail to lose their families and jobs because the drug they like is different than the one the state likes does absolutely nothing to improve social stability. Very much so the opposite.
Most prisoners have been convicted of a violent crime.
State data:
Total violent crimes (2020): 651,800
Non violent crimes (property/drug/public order/other) (2020): 141,100/131,600/109,100/6,800. Total=388,600
Federal data:
Total violent crimes (2020): 10,547
Non violent crimes: (property/drug/public order/other) (2020): 5,950/66,474/58,894/433, Total = 131,751
Combined:
Violent crime (2020): 662,347
Non-violent crime (2020): 520,351
With that said, there is massive disparity in federal crimes, where there are almost 7x the sentences for drug crimes compared to violent crimes. But that includes trafficking etc. and can't be characterized as 'simple possession'
https://felonvoting.procon.org/incarcerated-felon-population...
yes I know a drug offense is not just simple possession but I mean, you didn't try to provide anything for your astounding claims, so I figure I could get the ball rolling here.
as far as Sweden https://www.statista.com/statistics/534214/sweden-persons-se...
3237 people in Swedish Prison for drug offenses
Sweden has a population of over 10 million so less than 0.03%
going by this https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/01/16/percent-incarce... I figure the American rate must be 0.2%
It is not close. Which is what I think most people would predict - that it was not even close.
on edit: I see Bumby went and got some stats too, to clarify I don't doubt that violent offenses outweigh other offenses, what I doubt is that America does not have a large number of people incarcerated for drug possession.
The same source[1] lists drug possession as 34k of 132k total in state prisons. That suggests only a quarter of the drug offenses are actually for possession, and it's only 3.2% of the overall state prison population. That said, those figures represent the upper bound of of people in prison for possession, because offenses could be pleaded down.
With the caveat that drug offenses include manufacturing, trafficking, and sales:
Your data is consistent with my claim: I meant the denominator being the prison population, not the entire population. Sweden has about 8600 people in prison so about 37% of their prison population is in there for "drug offenses", whereas in the United States it's less than 1 in 5 per your Prison Policy citation. Obviously if you treat entire population as the denominator, then any comparison of Swedish and American prisons is useless because we incarcerate a much larger percent of the population.
Edit: I realize my original comment said "people" not "proportion of people", but in my defense interpreting it to be people literally is a bit absurd. Sweden's population is about 30x smaller than the United States, so there's no way the counts are comparable!
Edit 2: Actually no I did say “As a percentage”. Whew.
Next, you can see from this sample of federal prison (table on page 2): though drug offenses were the most serious charge for half of prisoners, only 0.1% was for possession. The rest was for trafficking and sales. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/dofp12.pdf
This data is from 2010, and the United States has undergone a decriminalization revolution since regarding possession, so new prosecutions are even less likely to be possession claims.
With the caveat to your caveat that "sales" in the US tends to include anything above 1 or 2 doses. I'm no bartender, but I'll still buy beer by the twelve pack.
Assuming you even get to a jury trial. For most pseudo-distribution cases like this, the defendant is going to plead out, because they know they're dead to rights on the possession charge, and if the judge throws the book at them for that then they may well have been better off taking the distribution plea deal.
If you're caught in possession of a couple grams of coke, then the prosecutor is going to want to get you on distribution. They can say something like "You will be found guilty of possession, we both know that. If you plead guilty on both counts, we can recommend concurrent sentencing and you'll be out of prison in less than two years. If you don't take the deal, we're going to push for everything we can get: even if you get off on the distribution charge, you'll still be in prison for 3 years for possession."
Now, you or I, affluent tech-bros that this forum attracts, know that this is a terrible deal. We'd hire a lawyer, fight it tooth and nail, and walk away with a possession conviction and a slap on the wrist sentence. But if you're some broke kid, with a public defender who's really just there to counsel you on what plea deal you should take, it might not seem like such a bad idea.
Like I said, getting aggregate statistics on how pleading down impacts the composition of the prison population is very hard, but the fact of the matter is most people who end up in prison don’t do so because of anything which looks like only recreational drug use.
https://www.justcriminallaw.com/drug-charges/2023/04/24/drug...
> You can be charged with drug trafficking even if you have not actually sold any drugs. Prosecutors will try to show that you were in possession of a controlled substance and planned to sell or distribute it, even if you were going to distribute it for free or use it with friends.
Texas is finally calming down on weed but back when I was in college I knew plenty of friends that were slapped with "trafficking" because they had some normal amount of grams on them and the cops just went for it. That lets prosecutors scare them into shitty deals because with trafficking you're looking at years of prison.
Considering the scale of the American prison industrial complex, I'm sure plenty of people didn't have good enough lawyers to get the bogus trafficking charges thrown out.
As per OkayPhysicist's point about what counts as possession and trafficking, many drugs require larger dosages with habitual use and the courts do not take this into account.
on edit: I see Komali did a better job pointing out that lots of traffiking and sales are actually possession.
These also vary state to state, and while a white kid with a 1/4 might not get possession, a black kid with the same amount might get the book thrown at him depending on who’s prosecuting the crime.
this challenged my conceptions a little bit, while I wasn't blown a way by it, I did expect possession to be a higher percent of the whole. Here are some sources for others who are curious:
At yearend 2019 (the most recent year for which state prison offense data are available), 58% of all persons imprisoned by states had been sentenced for violent offenses (710,800 prisoners) [https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/p20st.pdf page 28]
For the same year, 46,700 people were in prison with the most serious crime being possession. This represents 3.8% of the prison population.
However; the above are statistics for STATE prisons. The federal system seems to be murkier, with 46% (67,000~) of inmates being their for drug related reasons. Unlike state breakdowns, drug crimes are differentiated here. If we assume the breakdown between possession and other charges is the same as state levels (a VERY shaky assumption) we'd expect 10% of the federal system to be related to possession.
Averaging some of these numbers, it seems that even in a 'worst case scenario' roughly 9% of inmates are in for possession, but more realistically we're looking at around 4%.
I expected this to be in the 10-20% range prior to looking into this more deeply, something that isn't helped by the piss-poor dashboards by BOP https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
EDIT: started researching this prior to seeing that others had posted :)
I would bet good money that rate is even lower now. Many states proceeded with decriminalization campaigns for possession in the meantime, most reasoning from false premises.
Don't know if you picked Sweden in particular intentionally but they are very much an outlier of their own when it comes to drug-related crime. Simple possession of small quantities for personal use can still have you end up in jail or even prison for up to 6 months.
They're still all-in on the War on Drugs.
It's fun to declare it "things the state doesn't like", but I legitimately don't see anyone legalizing meth or heroin anytime soon.
Portugal did exactly this (or decriminalized them for personal use anyway).
The state has a legitimate interest in limiting the number of people taking opioids in public. It's self-defeating to do that through mass incarceration. To be determined how well decriminalization works. But it's definitely not that the government just doesn't like drugs - hard drugs really do have societal costs.
>After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs. The country is now moving to create a new institute aimed at reinvigorating its drug prevention programs.
Can't decriminalize drugs if you stop funding drug treatment programs and chuck it all onto underfunded NGOs who have their own motivations.
As you point out, we can simultaneously criticize our current policies while acknowledging simplistic replacement policies aren't really solutions.
The initial goal of drug laws may be in the vein of stabilizing society, while poor implementation strays from that goal. Both can be true at the same time. Poor implementation begs for better implementation, not the nullification of the goal. I am not defending current drug policies, I'm guarding against the notion that the "solution" is just to make consensual crime legal.
This side-steps a relevant discussion about how you measure societal stability, but that would be a long digression to itself.
> Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “War on Drugs” in 1971 and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues.
> [Ehrlichman, Nixon’s advisor for domestic affairs] “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-shocking-and-sickening-st...
The congressional black caucus were ardent supporters of the war on drugs https://www.wnyc.org/story/312823-black-leaders-once-champio...
So I'm pretty sure that whatever motivation Nixon had, the Black community in the United States wasn't a big fan of drugs and wanted them gone.
That is difficult to square with Nixonian plot to use the carceral apparatus to keep Black people from gaining power.
I guess it does track with revisionism to make anything we currently disagree with to be a product of original sin.
“nearly every major Black abolitionist and civil rights leader before World War I—from Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany and Sojourner Truth to F.E.W. Harper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington—endorsed temperance and prohibition.”
Hardly the group I would associate with oppressing minorities.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/02/06/forgotten-...
Not everyone who is white today was white 100 years ago.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=prohibition+anti+immigrant
Take your pick.
The other thing I'd like to just bring up is that the either/or between criminalising/not criminalising drugs can sometimes miss that there are many creative, diverse and humanising responses to problematic drug use that don't depend on control via the threat of punishment
The relevant analytical unit at the small scale is the family: I don't want my kids to be temperant because of stability, I want them to abstain from drugs/games/$VICE because that's the path which maximizes the chance of their living a fulfilling life, or (more cynically) which maximizes their chance of bearing me successful grandkids and great grandkids. This is why puritainism is selected for evolutionarily (at least in environments where resources are limited).
To return to the large scale policy questions, I also don't want to see the continent of my children fall to a mercantilist China (using China as an example because Chinese law cracks down hard on drug sales and limits students to one hour of video games per night). Accordingly, I support policies to limit access to addictive substances and stimuli, despite the inevitable conflict between those laws and individual rights. The inequitable enforcement of those laws is another problem entirely, and one which I think would be well solved by starting with the prosecution of celebrities and thought leaders who openly partake in $ADDICTIVE_STIMULUS, and their suppliers.
So I’m not sure that there is a strong distinction between “ensuring my family has a good outcome” and “ensuring a stable society” because a stable society is meant to be a means and not an end. Regardless, this feels a bit like an untestable hypothesis.
Good science controls for variables. Counting the number of offspring turns a blind eye to a number of variables that can influence the outcome beyond just moral beliefs or cultural norms. Can you say your results aren't influenced by factors like genetics, environment, war, etc. that are outside those moral beliefs? Even if you could control for them, a lot of that data isn't available from an evolutionary perspective. And even if it was, moral beliefs are not static; you could have one set of morals that leads to higher numbers of offspring in one stage of your life and change morals later. It makes for a messy, and probably untestable, hypothesis.
That's my main gripe that led me to the OP. People tend to take an enormously messy social situation and think they can distill it to a simple model. Real life tends to not work that way.
And thus is the pyramid scheme maintained.